9. Quoting from your book's forward: "....the relegating of history to an antiquated closet of insignificance is not only intellectually unsound but fundamentally dangerous." How much of the US American publics' minimization of the value of history do you think is orchestrated by the plutocracy which has managed to leverage most of the wealth and power in the United States?
I do believe that a significant amount of the minimization of history is orchestrated by the plutocracy, but there are other factors at work as well. First, we have a president who received an undergraduate degree in history from Yale and nearly brags about his doing so by making C's and D's. In addition, technology, which I love and utilize as much as anyone else, has seduced us into believing that only that which is instant, momentary, or future-focused is worth considering. Current conditions do not lend themselves to a consideration of history as relevant or valuable. I believe that we live in an infantilized culture, and I have written about this extensively, as recently as in my commentary on the film "Children Of Men". Part of the infantilization is due not only to the United States being a very young nation compared with European countries, but we have little sense of history. What inkling most Americans do have is inordinately positive. Few students coming into my classes have any concept of Native American genocide or the actual treatment of African Americans before or after the Civil War. For most of them, U.S. history is "white, bright, and light"-we were the good guys in white hats, devoid of any dark side. I've noticed, however, that during the past six years, that attitude has been changing specifically as a result of war-weariness and the demise of Bush's popularity.
Moreover, and this is extremely important, if people do not know their own history, then like children, they are easily manipulated and controlled and have little discernment about when they are being lied to by their government or the extent of corruption in their government. Being unfamiliar with the U.S. Constitution and the process by which it was formulated makes citizens extremely vulnerable to oppression because as a result of their ignorance, they do not know when their rights are being violated, why they should not be violated, why hundreds of thousands of men and women died so that these rights would not be violated, and that citizens have every right, not only to make certain that their liberties are not violated, but that according to the Constitution, when their government does so, they have a right and a duty, to abolish that government. Certainly, such ignorance of history benefits the plutocracy and no one else. That is the danger of not knowing one's history.
10. How do you believe the opulent class and corporatists use the dearth of historical knowledge amongst the masses in the United States to their advantage? If the question is too broad, perhaps you could simply provide a few specific examples.
No, the question isn't too broad. As stated above, unfamiliarity with the history of the U.S. Constitution creates people who function like sheep in obedience to their government. For example, unfamiliarity with the war in Vietnam makes certain that young men and women have no historical perspective about fighting in wars. Many have heard that the "poor U.S. troops" upon returning from Vietnam were spit on by protestors, but they have no clue that thousands of those returning troops quickly joined the anti-war movement, and they have no clue about why because they have no historical understanding of the Vietnam War and what it was about.
When I teach the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century periods of U.S. history, students rarely know that working people at the time were subjected to ghastly mistreatment by management with no laws to protect them. They take working five days a week with a guaranteed lunch break and bathroom breaks for granted, as they take getting a paycheck and having a weekend for granted, not knowing that working people of earlier eras in the U.S. often worked 18 hours a day, 6 days a week and got no paycheck or were cheated on the amount they received. In my class they learn where these things that they take for granted in the workplace came from, and they learn about the lives that were lost in the cause of making sure that working people had humane treatment and that their civil liberties were respected.
When you do not know your history, you can be sorely taken advantage of, and of course, who does that benefit?
11. As I watched Scott Pelley interview our unitary executive on Sixty Minutes last Sunday, I literally felt a chill go down my spine followed almost immediately by a feeling of intense rage when I heard this exchange:
PELLEY: Do you believe as commander-in-chief you have the authority to put the troops in there no matter what the Congress wants to do?
BUSH: In this situation, I do, yeah. Now, I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I made my decision, and we're going forward.
Drawing on your knowledge of history, when has another US president so boldly asserted his intention to utterly defy the system of checks and balances so crucial to the preservation of our Constitutional Republic? Obviously, the Bush Regime has dealt many blows to what is left of our Constitution. How much weight do you give this one relative to the Patriot Act, Signing Statements, and MCC?
To my knowledge, no other U.S. president has so blatantly disregarded checks and balances, but in my book, I discuss a couple of incidents in which Bush's father did the same kind of thing as Reagan's Vice-President, but did so behind the scenes. For example, I explain in detail the creation of a black budget for the military industrial complex under Vice-President Bush which egregiously violates the U.S. Constitution.
While I give little attention to mainstream media, I do watch Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" on MSNBC every night. In the throes of debate on the Military Commissions Act a couple of months ago, I listened to Olbermann interview Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, and as they discussed the appalling violation of the Constitution that the Act is, Turley's principal lament was that the American people and Congress were doing nothing about it. Congress has little excuse since most of its members have some knowledge of U.S. history, but the American citizenry, ignorant of their history, if they had even heard of the Military Commissions Act, had virtually nothing to say about it, and if they did, it was most likely in support of torture and "doing whatever it takes" to get rid of those nasty terrorists.
I consider one of the final steps of sealing our fate as a fascist empire, this 2006 act which violates every principle of liberty in the U.S. Constitution. The violation is blatant-unprecedentedly blatant, but no other president of earlier generations could have gotten away with shredding the Constitution or calling it as Bush did "a goddamn piece of paper". That's because in those times, people still had enough sense of history to prevent such outrageous usurpation of power.
12.Your book touches on the darker aspects of US American history which are often white-washed or ignored in "mainstream" texts. Most history students spend very little time learning about the Native American genocide, chattel slavery, the violent oppression of labor and social movements by the moneyed class, US imperialism, and unprosecuted US war crimes (i.e. Dresden and the secret bombings in Cambodia). How much time do your students spend studying these facets of US history?
My students spend a great deal of time learning about those facets, alongside the positive aspects of our history. Zinn has done a fabulous job in PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES in recounting noble, courageous, and heroic acts undertaken by ordinary people in our nation's history that served to make us, in principle at least, a great nation. I educate my students in the necessity of knowing the dark side of their history, just as they should know some of the not-so-pretty parts of the personality of a person they plan to marry, or the unpleasant aspects of a job they want to be hired for. Without an integration of the dark side and the light side, we either become cynical and depressed, or infantilized sycophants. Either way, we cannot function as informed and useful citizens.
Must Read (
Well Said (
News (
Touching (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
Valuable (
